Imagine a crystal ball with an LCD screen—you point it at your data, ask a question about the future, and it will give you its best guess as to outcomes. That is what the future of predictive decision making, or predictive analytics, looks like. While we are not quite at that magical crystal ball moment, there are some key trends and currents affective the development of predictive analytics right now in the marketplace. Too much…

Because tomorrow, it’s all about Human Data. Big Data has become a big buzzword in marketing in recent years. As a CMO, you’re told that if you are not using Big Data for marketing, you’re missing out. But do you? Experts in the field predict that a half of Big Data projects will fail mostly due to their complexity, management failures and not setting clear business objectives. Could focusing on human-generated data instead be of…

In the rush to embrace the Big Data phenomenon, many organizations start just collecting data. These data collection programs vacuum up vast swaths of information and install Hadoop or some Apache project just to try to make sense of what is there. A few months go by and suddenly everyone in the organization is amazed by this data—after all, you can create reports by any conceivable dimension and just watch a bunch of data come…

In this era of big – no, Big – Data, we find ourselves surrounded by all sorts of data in all sorts of shapes and sizes. But as the old adage goes, quantity is not necessarily indicative of quality, and if the point of your Big Data program is to tease out insights and drive decisions based on hard data and analytics, it is important to pay attention to the quality of data that you…

The ability to understand human-generated data can benefit a business in many different ways. But it’s not an easy endeavor when you consider the billions of human interactions on social media. Social media analytics has found a way. And despite a popular belief, it isn’t just applicable in marketing. Gaining insights from social data can improve processes in staffing, supply chain management, product launch monitoring, threat detection and so much more. The key to finding…

They are hiding in there somewhere. Those tantalizing threads of information about your customers that enable you to understand why they think your service is superior to a competitor, the thought process they move through to buy your product or service, or the new innovations they’d like to see in your products. Those threads aren’t easy to find though. They are buried in a blanket of social commentary, blogs, emails, customer relationship management systems and…

Big data is here and offers a big opportunity for marketers. Ignore it and you make a big mistake. In the first of a series of articles, I will explain what Big Data is all about and how CMOs can take advantage of the burgeoning social analytics opportunity it presents. There’s an old maxim that data is like oil: it’s not much use to anyone until it is processed and refined. Data is gushing out of almost every part…

Today, we’re launching VEDO Intent, a new technology that significantly simplifies machine learning, helping developers to place it into the hands of people across the business. For the first time, organizations will be able to harness the full potential of social data and take action based on the intent of their audiences thanks to our advanced machine learning capabilities that surface intent at scale. Currently, social media is vital for marketing and customer service, but…

You have mass quantities of all sorts of data imaginable. And yet, to tease any insight out of that, you have to learn the equivalent of SQL or hire a bunch of data scientists to write queries for you full time. What is the alternative do this? It is called natural language processing, and it is the future of Big Data. Specifically, Big Data will become Big Democratized Data will be when computers and servers and services can understand…

Did you know that DataSift lets you work with many data sources using the same API? How about the fact that CSDL lets you write one line of code that targets all of your sources at once? These are just some of the things developers tell us why they love working with DataSift. We decided to highlight examples like these in a recent webinar with our Product Manager of Developer Relations, Brad Hubbard. We call…